Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/327

THE PRINCE saying straight out as she stood and looked at him: "What else, my dear, what in the world else can we do?"

It was as if he then knew on the spot why he had been feeling for hours in such fashion—as if he in fact knew within the minute things he hadn't known even while she was panting, from the effect of the staircase, at the door of the room. He knew at the same time, none the less, that she knew still more than he—in the sense, that is, of all the signs and portents that might count for them; and his vision of alternatives (he could scarce say what to call them, solutions, satisfactions) opened out altogether with this tangible truth of her attitude by the chimney-place, the way she looked at him as through the gained advantage of it; her right hand resting on the marble and her left keeping her skirt from the fire while she held out a foot to dry. He couldn't have told what particular links and gaps had at the end of a few minutes found themselves renewed and bridged; for he remembered no occasion in Rome from which the picture could have been so exactly copied. He remembered, that is, none of her coming to see him in the rain while a muddy four-wheeler waited and while, though having left her waterproof downstairs, she was yet invested with the odd eloquence—the positive picturesqueness, yes, given all the rest of the matter—of a dull dress and a black Bowdlerised hat that seemed to make a point of insisting on their time of life and their moral intention, the hat's and the frock's own, as well as on the irony of indifference to them practically playing in her so handsome rain-freshened face. The sense 297